Blogs

I can go days without looking in the mirror. And then, something drastic happens to force you to look at your image and terrible things start to happen. You start to notice things. Bad things. Like this...

Years ago, Barbara Walters suggested that if women raised their arms above their heads, it lifted the breasts and other, um, ample skin so it wouldn't look saggy. I wondered, could I walk around with my arms in the air without looking silly? Nope. So I didn't.

Fast forward to a month after my stepdaughter's wedding. She sent the link to the entire 542-picture wedding album, all of which I could look at online at my leisure. Within minutes, I zeroed in on the reception pictures. Many shots, more than necessary really, showed us "older" ladies on the dance floor, clearly thinking we looked hip dancing to funky music that apparently required all of us to fling our arms into the air with abandon. That day I realized my arms looked like hams hanging in the butcher's window.

These kinds of photos are important evidence, for example: we don't really look as cool dancing as we think we do. Another thing, almost as important: Barbara Walters was wrong. Lifting one's arms in the air does only this: the elasticity-less arm skin drapes down the humerus onto the radius and ulna in folds like melting wax. It was both a disturbing and fascinating observation.

Confronted with the droopy skin evidence, I looked in a mirror. And now I finally get what Nora Ephron was talking about - I feel horrible about my neck! When did this happen, this weird shift of fat and skin, this wrinkling, this discoloration? My head looks like one of those children's books where you spin the wheel and exchange heads, like having a dragon head on an elephant body. (That's just the first image that came to me.) There is a clear demarcation between the top of my neck under my chin and the bottom of it near my throat. Throw in a pair of metal bolts and the image is complete.

It surprised me to discover that my body was starting to look very different than the circa 1987 image I have in my head and that it obviously happened without my spotting it. I was also a little disturbed at how disturbed I was.I always felt that one of my better characteristics is that I have little to no vanity about my looks. ("No shock," says everyone, "we've seen your clothes.") I am slightly vain about my hair, and, oddly, my feet, but I never thought I'd be concerned about my aging appearance.

It happens, though, aging. And people age differently. I don't think Michelle Pfieffer walks around with her arms up in the air, but I bet she's just as concerned with her looks as the rest of us. My husband is the oldest of three and he has a head full of black hair, as compared to the all-gray and nearly bald of his two younger brothers. He also complained about his image in the wedding pictures; he said it just doesn't look the same as when he sees himself in the mirror. To prove it, he took a picture of himself while looking in the bathroom mirror. It was 20 minutes before I stopped laughing.

We all have to come to terms with the roller coaster ride of aging that our bodies take us on. And we might as well enjoy it, right? As the saying goes, "It beats the alternative."

- Cindy Eastman

Cindy Eastman's first book, a collection of essays entitled Flip-Flops After 50: And Other Thoughts On Aging I Remembered To Write Down, was published by She Writes Press in April 2014. She is a writer and an educator raised in Louisville, Ky., and attended undergraduate schools in Austin, Texas, and graduate school in Springfield, Mass. Cindy holds a master's degree in education and has taught students from ages 5 to 85 in subjects including, but not limited to, poetry, English, creative writing and computer skills. She currently lives in Connecticut with as much of her family as possible.